More than the text, however, the real treat of Kirby: King of Comics is the lavish presentation of Kirby’s art. Never before have I seen comic book art reproduced so faithfully (and if anyone deserves such treatment it surely is Kirby). In fact, when I first peeked inside the book’s covers, I literally gasped.

Where other art books offer simple halftone reproductions of comic art, this one pulls out all the stops. Wherever possible, Kirby’s artwork has been reproduced from the original pages, and a rich, high-fidelity color process has been used throughout — even for black and white originals.

The results are stunning. Pencil marks and under-drawing are indistinct, but visible. The black lines appear as the inker laid them, full of tonal variations and clear brush strokes. Here and there the ink has faded to brown from light damage, or a piece of yellowed transparent tape can be seen. Still other drawings have obvious corrections made in white gouache. As the introduction by Neil Gaiman suggests, this incredible reproduction is truly the next best thing to standing in front of a Kirby original in a museum.

The book covers the span of Kirby’s career, from early, crude newspaper strips and advertising illustrations, to his last regular comics work for the independent publishers of the 80s. The works on display range from pencil roughs, to fully-inked, double-page spreads, to elaborately rendered watercolor presentation drawings. Many of them are marvels to behold (no pun intended).

I confess I never really “got” Kirby as a kid. By the late 1970s, when I was reading comics, artists like John Buscema and Neal Adams had arrived, bringing to comics a slick realism borrowed from the world of commercial illustration. Kirby comics would keep cropping up, and I’d be baffled: Who was this guy who seemingly couldn’t get his head out of 1961, with his weird, blocky anatomy and his ugly faces? Why did they keep hiring him?

It wasn’t until much later that I could fully appreciate Kirby’s genius — his dynamism, his effortless composition, his rich, pleasing use of contrast, his near-endless creativity. Sure, some of his ideas really were pretty hokey; it’s hard to see how kids raised on the X-Men could fall for a gang of teenage hippie-heroes called the Forever People. But had a book like Kirby: King of Comics existed back then, I could at least have appreciated the raw, unadulterated talent of the man.

As for the text, well, it is what it is. If you want a thorough account of Kirby’s life and career, from humble beginnings to accolades late in life, you got it. If you want to talk about whether Stan Lee or Jack Kirby deserves more credit for inventing Marvel’s most memorable characters, or debate the finer points of Kirby’s contractual disputes, you’ll have to look elsewhere. This book makes no effort to criticize much of anything Kirby did, opting instead for a generous, even obsequious tone throughout.

But much of that stuff is lost to history, anyway. The only person who could answer your questions would be Stan Lee, and he’s the first to admit his memory isn’t what it was. What remains are the art and the stories — and I doubt you’ll find a better representation of those than this book.

I give this one my highest recommendation. My only gripe is that, at 224 pages, it could have used a couple hundred more.

This is a fine enough idea, but unfortunately Gibson’s execution lacks whatever spark might make it work in practice. His own personal zeitgeist is just a little too eager, a little too agog with the possibilities of modern technology for my tastes. He has a bad habit of repeating himself, going over and over the same old ideas. And worst of all, in the case of Spook Country, he’s not above delivering a dull, flat little book.

Readers heaped praise on Pattern Recognition, Gibson’s last novel, and indeed it was all right enough. Nobody seemed to notice, though, that the main plot device — a search for the origin of some mysterious art — was the same one Gibson used in Count Zero.

Spook Country doesn’t borrow so blatantly from Gibson’s back catalog, but it doesn’t tread a lot of new ground, either. The only prominent piece of not-invented-yet technology is, you guessed it, a helmet that lets the wearer visualize digital graphics in 3-D space. Among the characters, you’ve got your mysterious ex-government combat agent types. Some of them seem to channel voodoo loa as a form of meditation (Count Zero again). Just as Pattern Recognition’s protagonist was named Cayce (rhymes with Case, a character from Neuromancer), here we meet a homeless hacker named Bobby — a name Gibson used for characters in Burning Chrome and Count Zero, both. Hollis Henry, our heroine, may not have mirrored lenses implanted into her eyes, but she is a former rock musician. This in turn gives her a reason to be hanging out with characters with clever names like Inchmale and Odile.

It’s as if Gibson wants to mine all his best ideas from his Neuromancer trilogy notebooks, only then paint them over with a veneer of banal modernity, to make them seem less “scifi” and more “modern and relevant.” And it doesn’t work. What we’re left with is a dull mishmash, full to bursting with ideas that go nowhere and plots threads that deliver nothing.

In Pattern Recognition, Cayce was literally allergic to branding. This was an interesting idea: What are we to make of it? But Gibson just acted as if it was a perfectly normal allergy for someone to have. Instead of using it as a plot device, he just tossed it into the mix and kept going. Similarly, in Spook Country Gibson posits an entire subculture dedicated to creating 3-D artwork in virtual spaces that can only be viewed with the magic helmets, but this also has little if anything to do with the plot. Toss and go.

Gibson’s characters are nothing if not cool, but in Spook Country they seem to have been boiled down to their final essence, so cool that they’re practically faceless. Among all the characters in the three different plot threads Gibson tangles together, only Hollis Henry seems to have any kind of recognizable inner life. What’s more, Gibson wants to keep the outcome of the plot a secret, so the reader is incapable of fathoming the characters’ motivations.

As for that plot, much of it remains a mystery even after finishing the book. We are told, at last, what the characters are doing. It’s left for us to puzzle out why they should bother. Without giving too much away, it has something to do with Iraq war profiteering — something. We’re never really told what.

It’s all so terribly serious. And yet, I found I couldn’t take it seriously. The whole thing is a little bit like being a spectator of a Victorian intrigue, seen from the vantage point of the court furniture maker. Not only are you not privy to the details, but you half suspect you wouldn’t even be interested.

From Sickboy’s mouth to God’s ear, courtesy the pen of Mr. Irvine Welsh. And with his latest scribblings, Welsh completes the circle. Sickboy’s Unifying Theory of Life: Beautifully fucking illustrated, in the form of If You Liked School, You’ll Love Work.

It’s difficult to tell if this collection is an attempt to cash in, an attempt to cash out, or just a bunch of failed experiments. One thing is certain, however: It’s far from Welsh’s best (a spot that I might reserve for Porno, though Glue is definitely in the running).

The first piece is Welsh with his “transgressive” knob dialed up to 11, its central plot element being a man who gets bit on the penis by a rattlesnake. True to this puerile genre of story, his best male friend offers to suck the poison out. Throw in a few descriptions of masturbation (clandestine and otherwise), some references to Burning Man, and forced homosexual fellatio at gunpoint, and … well, that’s pretty much it. It there was any point to it beyond a schoolboy snicker, it was lost on me.

Next up is another amusing — but mostly irrelevant — tale of British lower-class boys behaving badly abroad, in this case on a Spanish island. Our hero must juggle his drink, his “birds,” and his precarious grip on respectability. Again; that’s about it.

“The DOGS of Lincoln Park” brings Welsh Stateside to visit with some stuck-up girls in Chicago. He paints a pretty good picture of some thoroughly unlikeable women, then throws in a possible love interest in the form of a chef at an Asian restaurant. Apparently Welsh doesn’t realize that Asians are perhaps not as exotic to Americans as they are to Scots, because he wastes no time in trotting out all the old stereotypes: How are Koreans different from Chinese, really? Do they or do they not eat dogs? Do they have small penises? If one got me alone, would he kill me? Thankfully Welsh decides the last three in the negative, and we are left with yet another sketch that seems pointless to anyone who has more than a tourist’s-eye view of the U.S.

Unfortunately, Welsh compounds his mistake by offering up another story based in the States. This one follows a filmmaker, a refugee from the Hollywood scene who was raised in Texas — a fact that is apparently meant to explain why he constantly talks like a cowboy from a Pace Picante Sauce commercial. Some sample dialogue:

It was midday and the sun was at its cruelest and even an ol Texan boy like myself, living in LA til fairly recently, could sometimes forget how fierce it could be. Out there the bastard baked all the freshness out of the air, leavin it feelin like particles of iron in your lungs. As your throat seared your respiratory system started bangin and you sweated like a solitary truck-stop hooker gaspin goodbye as the last lusty buck in that convoy pulled on his dirty ol jeans.

Git a rope.

The plot isn’t much better, and it ends on a contrivance that would make the hacks who cranked out the stories for Tales from the Crypt comics groan.

It’s only the last story in the collection that redeems it, a novella called “Kingdom of Fife.” It’s no coincidence, either, that the only really worthwhile piece in the bunch brings Welsh back to his native Scotland. “Kingdom of Fife” proves that Welsh’s use of Scots dialect is more than just for show. He succeeds at it because it is here, on the grimy streets of Scottish cities, that he is truly “writing what he knows.”

The same tricks don’t work when he tries to portray American characters, because Welsh is decidedly not an American. He does appear to be Scottish through and through, however, and his curious characters (entirely new in this case, with no guest appearances from the Trainspotting gang) ring true here just as they have in earlier works. And the story itself is not bad. Nothing really to write home about, but an an enjoyable enough read.

So maybe I was too harsh there at first. If You Liked Work, You’ll Love School isn’t necessarily proof that Sickboy’s Unifying Theory has come home to roost in Welsh himself. It does illustrate the potential for a slide, however, and after the lackluster effort with Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs I was hoping Welsh would try a little harder.

Hopefully the fragments on display here are just that: Random pieces that Welsh was working on and almost discarded, only to rapidly rework into a form that would be worthy of publication here. Hopefully with his next work he’ll come back and deliver the goods.

Dune fans are deeply divided on the film. I enjoy it, myself; but on this recent re-reading of the book, I was struck by two things. First, the film does a far better job of following the storyline of the book than I expected it to. But at the same time, the book is a very different creature from the film.

Messianic figures have been a recurring theme in science fiction stories — and, since Star Wars, films. Paul Atreides is no Luke Skywalker, however. Lynch’s attempts to portray the young kwisatz haderach as a heroic rebel leader helped to make Herbert’s characters more palatable for a moviegoing audience, maybe, but this portrayal has little grounding in the original material.

What struck me most about Herbert’s novel, really, is just how cryptic and unappealing all of his characters are. Paul himself is depicted as, by turns, taciturn, arrogant, and emotionless. At the opening of the book, he’s surrounded by his father’s royal courtiers, whom Paul regards with love and respect, as if they were a kind of galactic Three Musketeers. Herbert never fails to remind us, however, that Duncan Idaho, Gurney Halleck, and the Mentat Thufir Hawat is each, in his own right, a ruthless murderer and assassin.

Paul’s mother is a scheming and manipulative power broker. His younger sister is a precocious freak of nature. His relationship with Chani, who becomes mother to his child, seems distant and half-formed. He never marries her; instead, he marries the Emperor’s daughter as part of a power-play. The child dies; Paul figures they’ll have another.

The Clan Harkonnen seems to be universally despised by the Clan Atreides, but are the Atreides really any better? Or is this just a manifestation of a kind of cosmic racism?

And speaking of racism, let’s not forget that the backdrop of the universe of Dune includes a massive eugenics program conducted over thousands of years, the aim of which was apparently to produce Paul. I’m not sure I’d have him over to dinner, but apparently he’s the one thing the universe needs most.

And about that: Is it really true? In the movie we took it as written that Paul was a conquering messiah who freed his people from oppression. In the book, however, Paul foresees the likely outcome of his own ascendancy — a bloody jihad that sweeps across the galaxy — and he secretly struggles to prevent it. Even his status as a legitimate religious figure is in question. Does such a thing as a kwisatz haderach even exist? Or is it only part of the twisted missionary work conducted by Paul’s mother’s Bene Gesserit Order, designed to sow seeds of superstition that encourage uneducated people to serve the Order’s ends?

Toward the end of the book, we’re told that the sinister Count Fenring — a character who does not appear in the movie — is actually an almost-kwisatz haderach, a product of Bene Gesserit eugenics that didn’t quite make it. How are we to interpret this fact? Imagine an also-ran Jesus, writing memoirs about what it was like to hang around with the early Christians, mad that he didn’t get invited to the Last Supper.

Dune is a ponderous book. As I mentioned before, Herbert isn’t writing about characters, as such. His scope is wider — much, much wider — to the point that the plot of the book reads like watching a chess game, one in which you’re never entirely sure of the rules. You’re never expected to sympathize with the players or even understand their moves. Sometimes you’re not even meant to know who the players are. It’s enough to know that a game is being played. As Herbert writes:

In the face of these facts, one is led to the inescapable conclusion that the inefficient Bene Gesserit behavior in this affair was a product of an even higher plan of which they were completely unaware!

Of whose plan is he speaking? We never know. That’s actually the last line of one of the last appendices of the book.

Will I read the rest of the series to see how it turns out? Maybe. I think I’ll have to give the first book a while to sink in. I am pleased to report, however, that Dune remains one of the classics of the sci-fi genre and a worthwhile read.

What is a surprise is that Palahniuk really seems to be serious about trying experimental approaches to writing. His last book, Haunted, was pretty much a short story collection in the form of a novel, but at least it showed him trying something new, after a series of novels that was growing increasingly repetitive. His latest, Rant: An Oral Biography of Buster Casy, takes the experimentation even further. It attempts to be what its title sounds like: a kind of postmodern epistolary novel delivered in the form of sound bites and monologues.

Palahniuk isn’t the first to try this form, and in retrospect, though I like to see that he’s not just phoning it in after all, I have to say it’s my least favorite aspect of the book. Your first clue that Palahniuk wasn’t able to pull the device off effectively is the apologia he saw fit to include at the beginning of the book. (”For additional biographies written in this style, see Capote by George Plimpton,” he helpfully advises us, even while getting the title of the book wrong.) Palahniuk is known for his witty novels and odd ideas, but if you have to explain the joke every night it’s probably best if you just leave it out of your repertoire.

And, sure enough, this joke just isn’t that funny anyway — all the characters sound exactly like snippets from any of Palahniuk’s other novels. Which is to say, none sounds like a real human being. But given the context of the novel, let’s give Chuck a break and just assume that the world of Rant is one populated by witty, postmodern authors disguised as hillbillies — but more on that later.

If it’s odd ideas you’re looking for, you got ‘em. The first part of Rant reads like sort of a continuation of Haunted, where Palahniuk dreams up every crude and deviant idea he can think of and stitches them all together into a crazy-quilt plot about a bizarre and surreal corner of rural America.

You’ve got a man who can tell which of his neighbors has used the condom or tampon he’s just found, simply by smelling it. A man who likes to stick his hands into holes in the ground to see what will bite him. A deformed woman with a shrunken arm and palsy on one side of her face, so she drools constantly. A man whose teeth are black because he chews road asphalt instead of gum. A town menaced by packs of wild dogs.

Later, when the characters relocate to the Big City, we’re introduced to a society where people are separated by curfew into “nighttimers” and “daytimers.” Where people like to go out and crash their cars into one another, seemingly just for the fun of it. Where a plague of rabies is spreading across town, transmitted from person to person like an STD.

Of course, as usual a lot of Palahniuk’s wilder ideas don’t really stand up to any kind of scrutiny. The notion that Buster Casey could fund his activities by pawning a mountain of rare coins seems to defy the most basic concepts of economics. I’ve never had rabies myself, but I’m pretty sure it doesn’t work the way Palahniuk says it does, and certainly nobody would ever want to get it (or get treated for it) more than once. And it seems to me that any dog breeder could tell you that Palahniuk’s concept of eugenics doesn’t make any sense at all — or, if you don’t know any of those, try a high school biology student.

Moreover, a lot of readers are bound to ask just what is the point of all this garbage? Is there any kind of real story here, or is Palahniuk just trying to leave you feeling ill?

Well, as it turns out, there is a point to it all, and this is where the book gets interesting. Without giving too much away, by the second half — when the science fiction elements start turning up — you realize that this isn’t the kind of book you were expecting it to be at all. Palahniuk turns most of your preconceived notions about his writings and this subject matter on their heads. As it turns out, what’s happening isn’t exactly what it appears to be, the characters aren’t exactly who they appear to be, and there is a reason why everything has seemed to go so implausibly haywire from the very beginning. I’ll leave it up to you to discover what that reason is.

All told, I enjoyed this book, and I wasn’t really expecting to (especially after the first couple of chapters). I think it’s probably the best Palahniuk has turned out in the last few years. I’m still hoping he tries to stretch his literary wings a little further (the epistolary device is cute, Chuck, but how about some long sentences, some real characters, less of the repetition, more description, more metaphor, fewer urban myths and pop culture references — just to try it out, just for once?) but for once I can say he surprised me and gave me more than I’d hoped for.

Probably you have not. Even the word “parasite” has a bad connotation in our society. Parasites are the spongers, the moochers, the lowlifes. Call someone a parasite and it’s clear you have nothing but contempt for him.

But that’s human society, says Zimmer. In nature, the role of the parasite may be considerably different. Modern thinking in the field of parasitology suggests that parasites might not be mere afterthoughts in natural ecosystems, but absolutely essential to them.

If that about-face isn’t wild enough, Zimmer has plenty more stunners to lay on you. The most mythologized aspect of modern parasitology is the idea that parasites can control the behavior of their hosts. Toxoplasma gondii, for example, can make mice hang around in areas that smell of cat urine — the mouse equivalent of spending a night alone in a haunted house. The eerie implication is that Toxoplasma can make mice want to get eaten, so that the parasite can be passed on to its preferred host: a cat.

Studies suggest that Toxoplasma can alter the behavior of human hosts, too. What’s more, Zimmer tells us, in some areas of Europe virtually 90 percent of people are infected with Toxoplasma gondii. Could this one microscopic parasite be influencing the behavior of entire human populations?

It’s an intriguing notion. To his credit, however, Zimmer cautions against anthropomorphizing these tiny invaders. A parasite like Toxoplasma gondii isn’t really an evil puppet-master. Its powers, though poorly understood, are probably attributable to nothing more than some simple magic on the molecular level — nature’s version of Prozac, say.

The thing to think about, Zimmer emphasizes, is the bigger picture. Parasites are virtually everywhere. Believe it or not, the majority of living species are parasitic. Each has some kind of impact on the other creatures in its ecosystem, even if it’s not explicitly tinkering with their brains. Viewed cumulatively, the impact of parasites on nature must be profound — so much so that eliminating parasitic organisms could put the natural order itself at risk.

The main weakness of Parasite Rex is that, as slim as it may be, Zimmer unfortunately seems to spend a lot of space reiterating the same ideas. To be fair, he points out that modern parasitology is very young, and part of his reason for writing the book is to popularize the field. If he can’t elaborate a certain point in more detail it’s often because we simply don’t know the answers yet. Still, as his chapters wore on, they sometimes seemed thin on real content — lacking names, dates, or hard science — and maybe better suited to shorter magazine articles until the facts get fleshed out more.

Zimmer returns to a favorite group of parasitic organisms again and again: blood flukes, Guinea worms, the microbes that cause malaria and African sleeping sickness. Obviously these are the “glamor parasites,” conjuring images of heroic doctors laboring in feverish jungle villages. But other, more commonplace parasites are completely ignored — head lice, for example, are never mentioned.

The book suffers somewhat from a semantic issue, also. Viruses and bacteria also live parasitically inside other living things, but they aren’t normally lumped into the grouping that scientists call “parasites.” Zimmer does point this out, but he doesn’t spend much time worrying about it. Where it becomes a problem, though, is in the later chapters, where he speculates about the big-picture effects of parasites — how they might keep animal populations in check or even spur evolution. He seems to want to give his parasites the full star treatment, when surely the same observations could be made of other microbial pathogens.

These are minor gripes, however. Zimmer is a fine science writer and if you’re interested in science you can’t go wrong by picking up one of his books. A word to the wise, though: If you’re squeamish, some of the descriptions of parasite biology in this book might leave you a little green around the gills.

I feel it’s necessary to point this out, because it flies in the face of the melodramatic copy on the inside dust jacket, which promises a story of suspense, “sinister” lesions, and the lead character “going mad.” This is a shame, because it seems like the author and publisher would be better served marketing this otherwise well-written and tightly paced novel to the type of people who might actually be interested in reading it. Instead, they seem to be selling it as a follow up to Haddon’s earlier book — The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, an unorthodox mystery told from the point of view of an autistic teen — which it most certainly is not.

I don’t know about you, but when I’m told that someone has “gone mad,” I imagine them screaming, seeing visions, writing Bible verses on the walls with their own feces, possibly killing people. A Spot of Bother is determined to be a novel told from a very stuffy, British point of view, however (you might have guessed as much from the title). And so, as it turns out, this character’s madness is actually more of the stuffy, British variety — the kind where any behavior that’s even slightly out of the ordinary is seen as cause to change the topic of conversation.

I started to feel sorry for poor old George, after a while. There’s no stabbing of anyone anywhere in this book. George does do a little cutting, however, and a whole lot of weeping and gazing dejectedly. He’s obviously going through a major depression. And for this they all say he’s “going mad.” Gee, way to go, people. How’s that for sympathetic?

But there’s a reason that none of them can pay attention to George’s encroaching personality disorder. And that is, of course, because there’s a wacky wedding afoot!

The most misleading part of the dust-jacket copy is that it gives you the impression that this is a book about George, which it is not. As I’ve said before, it’s a book about a family and a wedding. It’s not even told from George’s point of view. Instead, it jumps from one POV to the next, as we get little glimpses into the wacky lives of all these wacky, wacky characters.

While George is busy with his halfhearted attempt at going mad, meanwhile his wife is having an affair. Will she run away with the other man or won’t she? George’s son has had a fight with his lover — a homosexual, and in England no less — and he’s trying to figure out a way to mend things. And George’s daughter, whose wedding has been the catalyst for all this turmoil, has realized — no, wait, keep reading, you’ll never see what’s coming next — she’s realized that she’s not really sure that she wants to get married!

Yes! There, I said it. I’m sorry if I’ve given too much away. Maybe I should have marked it with something saying “SPOILERS AHEAD.” I was just so giddy with the telling of it that I’m afraid it all ran away with me.

Do you detect some sarcasm? Maybe at this point I’m actually doing the book a disservice. Maybe I’m just a little annoyed with it. Because it really is a perfectly serviceable novel. The dialogue seems authentic, the characters well-drawn, the pacing is good and the story concludes in a totally satisfactory way. It’s also a great book for people who like to read on the train, because it’s one of those books where the author starts a new chapter every couple of pages. I think there was literally something like 146 chapters in roughly 350 pages. All together, this adds up to a fairly enjoyable read about a wedding, a family, and all the drama and turmoil that surround their lives.

If that’s really the kind of thing you’re into.

The answer is yes and no. While Hyland’s novel does cover some familiar territory, she does so with a keen sense of perception that allows her to draw her characters in meticulous detail. Every situation in which they find themselves and their every action simply rings true, a quality that ultimately makes for a satisfying (if quick) read.

Carry Me Down is the melancholy story of an Irish boy, John Egan, whose twelfth year brings with it a number of changes. His body is changing; Hyland describes him as unusually tall for his age, and people often mistake him for older than he is. At the same time, his relationships are also changing. When a new girl arrives at his school, she steals away the affections of Brendon, his only real friend. He retreats to the comfort of his home life with his parents, who dote over him. But when familial strife removes even this refuge, John and his parents must move from pastoral Gorey to the slums of Dublin, and John’s world is effectively shattered — and so, perhaps, is his sanity.

The Catcher in the Rye is the obvious master mold for this particular subgenre of novel. There are other, quirkier examples — Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time and Iain Banks’s The Wasp Factory come to mind — but John Egan’s young, unreliable narrator bears the most similarities to Holden Caulfield.

Like Caulfield, he is an outsider, shunned and misunderstood by his classmates. Like Caulfield, he imagines himself capable of greatness, but never truly seems to achieve much of anything. He’s an observer, not an actor. And where Caulfield was endlessly frustrated with the “phonies” around him, Egan attacks the perceived hypocrisy of the world in a different way: He imagines himself the world’s greatest human lie detector, a talent he hopes will land him in The Guinness Book of World Records and win him and his family a trip to the Ripley’s Believe It Or Not Museum in Niagara Falls. Unfortunately, as he tries to develop his skill, it ends up causing him more harm than good.

This similarity to earlier books (and very successful ones) makes it difficult to praise Carry Me Down outright. I really did feel as if I had traveled down this road before, just set in a different time and place. But it’s worth mentioning the novel’s setting, because this might be its greatest strength.

Hyland spent her own adolescence in Dublin in the 1970s, and she captures the scenes and struggles of this location with occasionally breathtaking fidelity. At the same time, she reveals the inner life of her characters in ways that are moving, insightful, and occasionally disturbing, all the while giving the impression of dead-on accuracy to real people we will never meet. It is Hyland’s keen powers of observation and talent for the language that make this book a worthwhile read, even if we could wish for a slightly more original plot.

Two recent books aim to put a human face on the struggling peoples of Africa. One centers on the civil war in Sierra Leone in the 1990s. The other focuses on events that are even now unfolding in Sudan. Both succeed where news reports have failed us, even if the pictures they paint are not pretty.

A Long Way Gone is the memoir of Ishmael Beah, a young man who was inducted as a child soldier in the civil war in Sierra Leone, and his story is absolutely harrowing. It begins with the destruction of his village and everything he has known, followed by his flight across miles of unfamiliar terrain — shoeless, starving, and shunned by villagers who have learned to see any stranger, even a young boy, as a threat. And sure enough, by the end of the tale he is a ruthless killer, so thoroughly indoctrinated into army life that he smuggles a grenade onto the UNICEF truck sent to deliver him from the war, in hopes that he will be able to escape and return to his base.

Beah’s explanation of how a boy like himself could be convinced to devote years of his life to lethal armed combat is simple. Propaganda plays a role in the indoctrination process, both homegrown and in the form of American war movies. But the key instrument is drugs, and lots of them.

Before he leaves for his first mission, Beah is given pills to help him “stay alert.” He becomes addicted to them almost immediately. Upon returning from combat, the boy soldiers are greeted with a seemingly never-ending supply of cocaine, which they consume both straight and in a form called brown brown – cocaine mixed with gunpowder. Before long, most of Beah’s conversation with his barracks-mates revolves around drugs and violence, and little else.

A subtle genius of Beah’s narrative is that, beneath the fog of all this madness, any kind of political motivation for the conflict of which Beah is part becomes lost. He might be in the army, or he might be a rebel whose superiors call themselves the army. He might be fighting to free Sierra Leone from an oppressive regime, or he might be fighting to defend the government. All such considerations melt away, and the primary motivations of Beah’s group seem to be obtaining food, ammunition, and other supplies. And should anything get in their way, the directive is always clear: Kill everything that moves.

On the whole, Beah is a fine writer. I have to question some of the passages in the book — for example, the dream where Beah is carrying a corpse, only to look down and see that the corpse has his own face, seems too clichéd to be plucked from real life. But then again, it’s often the little touches that make his story so haunting. For example, on the evening that news arrives that Beah’s village has been destroyed, he remembers staying up late trying to memorize the words to “Now That We’ve Found Love” by Heavy D and the Boyz. In another passage a man has all his fingers severed save the thumbs, and we’re told that this mutilation is known as “One Love,” after a thumbs-up gesture popular in Sierra Leone.

There is redemption at the end of A Long Way Gone, but very little catharsis. Beah is rehabilitated and eventually enters life as a normal young adult. But his memories remain, as do the lingering after-effects of the war of which he was part. As long as the practice of child soldiering continues in other conflicts throughout the world, Beah seems to be saying, there will be other stories like his. Sadly, most will continue to go untold.

By comparison, What Is the What, a fictionalized memoir billed as a novel of Sudan by Dave Eggers (of McSweeny’s fame) is a quieter story, but is no less troubling. Its protagonist, one Valentino Achak Deng, manages to avoid being inducted into the army, although the threat seems ever-present. Where A Long Way Gone is in some respects a bloodbath, What Is the What is a slow burn.

Like Beah, Deng is driven from his village and uprooted from everything he has known. But unlike A Long Way Gone with its child soldiering, upheaval itself is the central theme of What Is the What.

The story is epic in its scope. Deng and his cohorts spend weeks trudging across the barren Sudanese landscape, starving, dying, being eaten by crocodiles. Then, after finally arriving in neighboring Ethiopia and Kenya, they find themselves penniless squatters in sprawling refugee camps. For years they live this way, any semblance of their former lives all but erased.

Even when some of the Sudanese youth are lucky enough to be given a new life in the United States, the truth still fails to live up to their expectations. They are minorities; they are poor. They work in restaurants, at retail stores, or at the front counter of a gym. At the opening of the story, Deng is robbed in his home at gunpoint by a black man who calls him “Africa.” A life that has been thoroughly smashed is difficult — perhaps impossible — to rebuild fully, and Eggers reminds us that there are many lives yet being shattered in the ongoing strife in Sudan.

True to form, the charity-conscious Eggers is donating all proceeds from the book to the Valentino Achak Deng Foundation, which distributes funds to Sudanese refugees in the U.S. and supports the real-life Deng’s college education. And that’s just as well, because otherwise the most immediate flaw in the book is the presence of Eggers himself.

I’ve never been able to decide whether a reader who made it all the way through both halves of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius should be congratulated or taken out back and shot. What Is the What proves that Eggers hasn’t learned all that much since his first book, and it’s full of frustrating passages that somehow manage to make a real-life Sudanese refugee sound like a self-absorbed Greenwich Village dilettante. The key, however, is to stick with it. By about 2/3 of the way into the book, Deng’s tale is in full swing, and much of Eggers’ sophomoric artifice falls away. By the end, you’ll agree that Deng’s story needed to be told. It’s just a shame that it had to be told by such a vain, pretentious twit.

The multiple narrators he used to great effect in Porno appear again here, but in Bedroom Secrets he handles them less deftly. Minor characters appear, are introduced by first and last name, give some details of their day, narrate six or eight paragraphs of the story and then disappear, never to be heard from again. Then Welsh will begin in the voice of an additional, omniscient narrator, only to drop into a major character’s voice in an italic aside, then drop back out again, then leave the omniscient voice aside altogether and carry on in the first person with another character. On the whole, it becomes a case of “too many cooks,” with the narrative occasionally reading like a scrapbook of short pieces.

This time Welsh doesn’t rely so heavily on the Scots dialect he has become famous for, and this was a good choice — he’s in danger of stereotyping himself — but he’s obviously less at home with “straight” narrative. Much of it seems forced, and it’s plagued by clichés, odd turns of phrase and strained, mixed metaphors (”Skinner felt something cold bite into him, like a giant insect was crushing his torso in its jaws” — a particularly cold insect?) Overall, Bedroom Secrets could have benefited from another round of rewrites.

And from time to time Welsh feels compelled to remind his audience that he is, after all, the Bad Boy of Scottish Literature, which is both good and bad. When these interludes of grotesque excess appear — the bodily functions, the cartoonish sexual anatomies of the elderly, the anal gang-rape, necrophilia — Welsh handles them with aplomb and they don’t fail to bring a smile to your face, if you’ve got that type of mind. But they feel tacked on. Welsh strives to deliver a mature novel but can’t seem to restrain his inner giggling schoolboy.

And as for the plot? It’s hit and miss. I was looking forward to Welsh’s interpretation of San Francisco (he spent a year or two living here) but Skinner’s quick jaunt to the City by the Bay seems superficial and out of place. The big reveal about Skinner’s missing father is predictable from not too far into the story; still, I didn’t see all the way to where Welsh was going with it. By the end of the book I was satisfied. Nonetheless, this is a flawed work. Welsh fans will doubtless enjoy it, and casual readers of his other works will be happy to find that it isn’t a total re-hash, but as a first exposure to Welsh’s work this novel is likely to leave you scratching your head.